Tag Archives: Savarkar

Savarkar send clemency letters to British to rescue himself, he not only ask for pardon but also surrendered by acknowledging that “I had a fair trial and just sentence and I will never take part in politics” & these evidences are available in ‘National Archives’ in New Delhi. (See: Far from heroism – The tale of ‘Veer Savarkar by Krishnan Dubey and Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, 7 Apr 1996, Frontline)

Any one who reads Savarkar’s biography or his autobiography ‘My Transportation for life’ will immediately know the hollowness in these charges. Savarkar writes, “It was my duty as a follower of responsive cooperation, to accept such conditions as would enable me to do better and larger work for my country than I was able to do during the years of imprisonment. I would be free thus to serve my mother country, and I would regard it as a social duty.” (My Transportation for Life by V D Savarkar, page 301) also “Whatever good I could do in the Andamans or whatever awakening I might bring about among its people was nothing in comparison with what I could do in India as a free man. On the other hand, in order to win my freedom, I would not stoop low or lend myself to anything mean or treacherous such as would bring disgrace on my country or be a blot on her fair name. Freedom thus obtained would have harmed the cause and would have been, as I regarded it, an immoral act.” (ibid, p.245). Such was Savarkar’s motive behind his struggle for release.

Savarkar was a true disciple of Chattrapati Shivaji. Shivaji too had sent similar letters and petitions to deceive the enemy as before the killing of Afzal Khan, during Siddi Johar’s siege and during his imprisonment at Agra. He had also accepted some humiliating conditions during the treaty made at the time of the siege of Purandar fort. However, Shivaji bid his time and avenged all insults when he became powerful enough. This is clever political stratagem. Vietnam’s Communist leader ‘Ho Chi Minh’ rescued himself from Kuomintang prison by sending similar kind of petition and assuring cooperation. He expressed his desire to Marshal Chang to work for ‘Dong Minh Hoi’ which was formed in Indochina with the help of Kuomintang government (‘Dong Minh Hoi’ was formed to oppose Ho Chi Minh’s ‘Viet Minh’ party).

When World War I broke out, Savarkar sent petition to the Government of India in 1914. He averred that were the British to grant Colonial Self-Government to Hindusthan and majority in Central Legislative Council, revolutionaries would help Britain in the War. He gave instances of European Governments setting their political prisoners free and even those of the liberation of political prisoners in Ireland to prove his point. Also, he added “I offered to do without any release for myself personally. Let them release all the political prisoners in the country leaving me alone in my own cell in the Andamans. I shall rejoice in their freedom as if it was my own.” (ibid, p.187). This proves that his demands were selfless and made on behalf of all political prisoners in Andamans, without regard to personal welfare.

Fully aware that the British would not release him fearing the role he would play in Indian politics, Savarkar stated before the Jail Commission in 1920, “If you forbid me from entering into politics, I shall do social and literary work in India. I shall try to serve mankind in many other ways and if I break any condition that you may impose upon me you are free to send me back to this prison on Transportation for Life.” (ibid, p246) He conveyed the same message during his discussion with Governor which is summarized as follows:
“Still, for a stipulated period, I agreed to take no part in politics, that is, in active, day-to-day, politics. In prison, I could not, of course, do any Politics at all. But when outside I could do other kind of work, educational, religious and literary and serve my country in diverse fields. Generals, as prisoners of war, cannot conduct the war and come on the battlefield. They are let off on parole after signing the pledge, like Lord Krishna, who agreed that he would not wield any arms during the continuance of the war. And it is considered no humiliation on their part to do so, and they consider it their duty to do so, in order that, later on, their services might be available to their nation by way of leading and guidance in other work.” (ibid, p.302).

Savarkar did indeed pursue a vigorous campaign of social reform, reform in language and script, Shuddhi (purification or reversion to Hindu fold), scientific outlook as per the conditions of his release.In 1920, most of political prisoners in the Andamans accepted and signed such terms of agreement. “They would abstain from politics and revolutionary activity for a certain number of years and if again they were tried and found guilty of treason, they would come back to the Andamans to serve the remainder of their life-sentence.” (ibid, p.254).

One need not go to New Delhi’s ‘National Archives’ to see Savarkar’s letter which has been presented as a ‘Clemency Letter’. Savarkar himself published the said letter in his book “Letters From Andaman” (letters which he send to his younger brother Dr.Narayan Savarkar from Andaman) as letter no.8 dated 06-07-1920 (original application which he send to British has date 02-4-1920). A significant excerpt of it is as follows:

”As to the question so often put to me and others by officers no less exalted than the members of the Indian Cabinet ‘what if you had rebelled against the ancient kings of India? They used to trample rebels under the feet of Elephants’. I answer that not only in India but even in England and all other parts of the world such would have at times been the fate of rebels. But then why did the British people fill the whole world with a howl that the Germans had ill treated their captives and did not allow them fresh bread and butter! There was a time when captives were flayed alive and offered as victims to Moloch and Thor and such other Gods of war!’ The thing is this that this advanced stage in civilization attained by man is the resultant of the efforts of all men and therefore their common inheritance and benefits all.

Speaking relatively to Barbarian times it is true that I had a fair trial and a just sentence and the Government is at liberty to derive whatever satisfaction they can from the compliment that they give a fairer trial and a juster sentence to their captives than the cannibals used to do. But it should not be forgotten that if in olden days the rulers flayed their rebels alive then the rebels too when they got the upper hand flayed alive the rulers as well. And if the British people treated me or other rebels more justly i.e. less barbarously then they may rest assured that they too would be as leniently treated by the Indian rebels if ever the tables are turned”

When the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms were introduced in 1919, Savarkar wrote to Montagu and Governor General, “I have further told them that if they granted real self-government to India with substantial elected majority in the Central Legislature and With no incubus of the Council of State upon it; and if they further granted full amnesty to Indian political prisoners in the country and outside, in India and in the Andamans. and to exiles in Europe and America, myself and many more like me will accept the new dispensation and, if elected to the Legislature, will exert to make the reforms a success. The Legislature that had all along treated me with scorn and indifference, and that excited an equal contempt in our hearts for it. Will, thenceforward, be our scene of action where we shall be proud to work and co-operate for the fulfillment of our aim.” (ibid, p.220)

All this clearly indicates that Savarkar was trying to deceive the British. Instead, some Indians are willing to be deceived. It is necessary to read ‘between the lines’ while reading political resolutions, letters and applications. Those who accuse Savarkar of cowardice or treason are either not capable or not willing to read ‘between the lines’. Savarkar never hid these letters or petitions. Instead, he detailed the political strategy behind the letters in his ‘My Transportation for Life’. Let no one make a song and dance that they have unearthed some State secret!

Is it true that Savarkar apologized for his deeds to seek release from jail in Andaman Islands?

No. He did not apologize for his deeds.

Savarkar was sentenced to Transportation for Life, TWICE and sent to Andaman Islands to serve that sentence. IT DID NOT MEAN 50 years in jail. After serving a few years (usually 3 to 4) the inmates were allowed to go to work outside the jail and eventually settle on the islands. Savarkar was denied this even after serving 11 years. That was utter barbarity.

At the time of the First World War Savarkar did write to Montague, then Secretary of State for India. He said that –

Britain should set up colonial self Government for India
In return Indian revolutionaries would cease all hostilities and help Britain in war effort.

The Governor General eventually replied, ” In the present circumstances it is impossible to give effect to your suggestion.”NO PLEA FOR CLEMENCY HERE.

Due to outcry about prison conditions on the Andaman Islands the British Authorities decided to close the jail on the islands. Concessions were being made to prisoners who wanted to settle on the islands. But these were denied to Savarkar. He did want to settle on the islands. He was forcibly sent back to mainland India and kept in various prisons for further 3 years.

Is it true that Savarkar’s health deteriorated in the Andamans and hence the Government was compelled to transfer him to Indian prisons in 1921?

In Andaman no medical aid was ever given to political prisoners. British Authorities were absolutely callous in this respect. Savarkar’s elder brother Babarao suffered terribly. The Savarkar brothers were sent back to mainland India not because of failing health but because Government had decided to close down the prison settlement in Andaman, after several years of mounting public pressure in India.

Every year, it is a practise of the Congress and the commie brigade to make some remarks on Hindu nationalism on the 30th Jan.

On Jan 30th, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. A few months before his death, Bharat had attained political Independence and a few hours before Independence, Bharat was partitioned. Partition was a result of the aggressive stand of the Muslim League, weak leadership of the Indian National Congress, the British strategy to leave Bharat in a tattered condition and above all, a submission to the political concept of the Darul Islam.

Arnold Toynbee writes ‘ What is Pakistan ? it was the first successful step in this 20th century to realize their ( Muslims) 1200 year old dream of complete subjugation of this country.

The country witnessed a holocaust. What followed was a never before seen cataclysm. The transfer of population that the Congress leaders wanted to avoid, took place. They were killed, robbed, looted in transit. As the biggest migration of population in recorded history was in progress, a most dangerous situation arose in the capital. Every 4th person in Delhi was a Hindu or Sikh refugee from Pakistan. This lead to a lot of anger against the Congress leadership. A number of organisations were involved in service activities for the refugees, giving them shelter, support and succour in their times of great tragedy. Guruji Golwalkar of RSS gave a call to the RSS swayamsevaks not to leave Pakistan until the last Hindu is safely moved from the troubled areas. Thousands of swayamsevaks gave up their life in this cause. This is documented in the book, “ Jyoti Jala Nij Praan Ki“.

Assassination of Gandhi : Nathuram Godse was one of the people who believed Mahatma Gandhi was squarely responsible for the partition of Bharat. On the fateful day, on January 30, 1948 he approached Gandhi during the evening prayer at 5:17 pm. Godse bowed, and shot Gandhi at point blank range. Godse himself shouted “police” and surrendered himself. His defence was documented in a book, “May It Please your Honour”.

However, there has been no explanation of why Gandhiji was not rushed to the hospital and was instead taken to Birla House, where he was declared dead.

Congress maligns RSS :

Inspite of no evidence against the RSS and inspite of Sardar Patel indicating that the RSS is not involved, Nehru went ahead to press for the ban on the RSS. This fact is evident from the correspondence between Patel and Nehru. Replying to the Prime Minister’s letter urging him to ascertain the RSS connection in the case, Patel sent a categorical reply on 27 February 1948, less than a month after Gandhiji’s assassination:

‘I have kept myself almost in daily touch with the progress of the investigations regarding Bapu’s assassination case. All the main accused have given long and detailed statements of their activities. It also clearly emerges from the statements that the RSS was not involved in it at all.’

When no plausible reason is found about why Nehru was so keen to ban the RSS, it can be concluded that Nehru saw a potential rival in Guruji Golwalkar. In fact, one day before Gandhiji’s murder, on 29 Jan 1948 Nehru was reported to have said that: “I will crush the RSS”.

Shri Guruji’s grand reception at New Delhi Station – 21st Aug 1949

That Golwalkar was immensely popular is documented by BBC. In 1949, BBC radio reported: ‘Golwalkar is a shining star that has arisen on the Indian firmament. The only other Indian who can draw such huge crowds is Prime Minister Nehru.’ Golwalkar was the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS at that time.

On February 4, 1948, the government banned the RSS. After a long struggle by the RSS swayamsevaks, the ban was lifted unconditionally.In a written statement to the Bombay Legislative Assembly on September 14, 1949 (Proceedings p2126) the Home Minister Morarji Desai admitted that the ban on RSS was no longer considered necessary; it was lifted unconditionally; and the RSS gave no undertaking – Lifting of ban was unconditional

Inspite of all the direct evidence, the Congress did not end at this, In 1966, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi appointed another commission under Justice JL Kapur, a retd judge of Supreme Court. It examined over 100 witnesses and submited a report in 1969. The Kapur Commission report said “

…RSS as such were not responsible for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, meaning thereby that one could not name the organisation as such as being responsible for that most diabolical crime, the murder of the apostle of peace. It has not been proved that they (the accused) were members of the RSS..”

Veer Savarkar also maligned : Swatantra Veer Savarkar life and his works were inspiration to many freedom fighters including Bhagat Singh. Such a person was also charged with the conspiring the murder of Gandhi. No evidence was found against him but the accusations against him by the Commie brigade abetted by the Congress continue. As recently as 2013, The Hindu carried an article accusing him once again. A rejoinder to the repeated accusation was published in Niti Central – Gandhi Assassination and Veer Savarkar

Few Unanswered Questions on Nehru :

Nehru was the Prime Minister candidate inspite of Patel being the overwhelming favourite. It is clear from the documentation during that period that Gandhi favoured Nehru primarily to ensure that the Congress doesn’t split during the trying times after partition. It seems apparent that Gandhi believed that Patel would work under Nehru but Nehru wouldn’t vice versa. Gandhi was disappointed by some of the decisions taken by Nehru and in fact had called for a public debate on policies. This naturally put Nehru on the back-foot. He never responded.

A missing Netaji Subash Chandra Bose ( under mysterious circumstances ), an assassinated Gandhi, an implicated Savarkar, and a reviled Golwalkar ensured that Nehru had a free run. In fact even in 1953, a potential contender like Syamaprasad Mukherjee died under mysterious circumstances in the jail of J&K. This was a state managed by Nehru directly.

It is apparent that the biggest beneficiary of the above sequence of events was Nehru. He remained the Prime Minister of the country for 17 years. It is also a known fact that Gandhiji was of the opinion of disbanding the Congress in the future.

Yet, no investigation was taken in that direction as to why he chose to target such luminaries! When a great freedom fighter like Veer Savarkar and Rishi like Golwalkar could be incarcerated, why no questions were raised against Nehru and Congress is something I have been intrigued with.

Few more questions,

When Gandhiji was shot point blank, why was he not moved to a hospital and moved to Birla House ?

Was there no intelligence inputs on the assassination ? When there were 4 earlier attempts to murder Gandhi, what were the additional measures taken by the Nehru government to provide security. Did any heads roll ?

Why was Nehru in a hurry to find an organization to link Godse with when Godse was insisting he was doing it in individual capacity ?

Prof. Rajendra Singh, 4th Sarsanghchalak of RSS in an interview to Outlook ( Jan 1998 ) said regarding Godse “Initially, he was a member of the Congress, later he joined the RSS and left it subsequently, saying that it was a slow organisation. Then he formed his own group.” Godse left the RSS in 1934 and joined the HMS as per his own admission to the court. He then formed his own group. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. Prof.Rajendra Singh had asked, “If investigations were done on whether RSS was involved in the assassination, why were there no investigations whether Congress was involved in allowing the assassination to happen” ? ( since he was a member of both the organizations and had left them ).

Gandhiji’s assassination gave an opportunity to Nehru to use enormous amount of state power to crush the Hindu nationalists. At the same time, he shifted the public discourse away from core national issues raising the bogey of Hindu fascism. This lead to sidelining of all major issues of national relevance like education, language, cow slaughter, agriculture, models of development, administration, and many more core issues. This was a classic example of the Marxist method of shifting public discourse.

The nation has to do a course correction. Bharateeyas must ask and seek what Nehru & Congress’s interests were in shifting the national discourse away from our core to the periphery.

References :

1. Tragic Story of partition – HV Seshadri

2. May It Please Your Honour – Nathuram Godse

3. The Hindu – Lifting of ban on RSS was unconditional by S.Gurumurthy

On September 13, 1929, a youth from Bengal gave up his life in a prison of Lahore fasting for 63 days.

The year 1929 was also when India’s freedom movement was getting the better of Gandhi. In 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai, who had an illustrious past in pre-Gandhian Congress, but like other Arya Samajists had become a Gandhian, succumbed to injuries from lathi charge at a Anti-Simon Commission rally in Lahore. The Bhagat Singh troika, in order to avenge Lalaji’s death, shot down the guilty police officer Saunders in broad daylight. Bhagat Singh escaped from Lahore and resurfaced on April 8, 1929, with Batukeshwar Dutt at Delhi’s Central Legislative Assembly, hurling two crude bombs and bundles of propaganda pamphlets.

Within days of Bhagat Singh’s arrest, police unearthed a house in Lahore used as a bomb making workshop. It followed a string of arrests like Sukhdev, Hansraj and Jaigopal; and further Shiv Verma, Rajguru, Vijay Singh and finally Jatin Das from Calcutta. This sensational event became popular as the Lahore Conspiracy Case that ultimately led to the execution of Bhagat Singh-Rajguru-Sukhdev on March 23, 1931.

But a year and half before Bhagat Singh trio, Lahore Conspiracy Case, claimed another victim viz Jatin Das. He laid down his life in a Lahore prison in Gandhian fashion. But Gandhi’s attitude towards him was more cold and intriguing. Subhas Bose, who admired Jatin Das wrote, “Jatin Das was twenty-five at the time of his death. While a student he had joined the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921 and had spent several years in prison. At the time of the Calcutta Congress in 1928 and after, he had taken a leading part in organising and training volunteers…” (pp 179-80). Whether at Cellular Jail (where Savarkar stayed) or Mandalay (where Bose was incarcerated) Britishjailers treated extremist political prisoners as harshly as any murderer or robber. In June, arrestees of Lahore Conspiracy Case decided to go on hunger strike to protest against atrocities. Though Jatin Das did not initiate that hunger strike, nonetheless he stopped them from deserting. The hunger strike aroused intense agitation in the country, but little softened the heart of the British authorities.

Bose chronicled subsequently, “As the days rolled by, one by one the hunger-strikers dropped off, but young Jatin was invincible. He never hesitated, never faltered for one small second but marched straight on towards death and freedom. Every heart in the country melted but the heart of the bureaucracy did not. So Jatin died on September 13th. But he died a martyr’s death.

After his supreme sacrifice, the whole country gave him an ovation which few men in our recent history have received. As his body was removed from Lahore to Calcutta for cremation, people assembled in their thousands and tens of thousands at every station to pay their homage” (p 179).

Bose wrote, “In this connection, the attitude of the Mahatma was inexplicable. Evidently, the martyrdom of Jatin Das, which had stirred the heart of the country, did not make any impression on him. The pages of Young India ordinarily filled with observations on all political events and also on topics like health, diet, etc., had nothing to say about the incident. A follower of Mahatma, who was also a close friend of the deceased, wrote to him inquiring as to why he had said nothing about the event. The Mahatma replied to the effect that he had purposely refrained from commenting, because if he had done so, he would have been forced to write something unfavourable” (p 180).

How Shall We Recover our Lost Intellectual Freedom

Sri Aurobindo says " How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom? By reversing, for the time being, the process by which we lost it, by liberating our minds in all subjects from the thralldom to authority. The Anglicized ask us to abandon authority, revolt against superstition to have free minds. What they mean is that we should renounce authority of the Vedas for Max Muller, the Monism of Sankara for the Monism of Haeckel, the dogmatisms of Pandits for the dogmatisms of European thinkers, scientists and scholars. Let us break our chains in order to be free, in the name of truth, not in the name of Europe.

Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think, - to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima…”.